Changeling (children's voices wild with pain)
by Nagia
Summary: The first morning after the Labyrinth run, her alarm clock doesn't work.


The first morning after the Labyrinth run, her alarm clock doesn't work. Sarah wakes to sunlight, to Irene hammering on the door and her digital clock blinking 4:32.

She has no idea what time it is until she heads the kitchen, where the clocks inform her that it's seven. She races to shower and get dressed for the day. Before she leaves, she resets her clock. It's still working when she gets home, but at bedtime it blinks midnight at her.

The clock never stays set for long. Eventually Sarah throws out the digital and buys an analog with a bell mechanism. And when that one starts resetting itself, she hunts through antique stores for a wind-up.

That one lasts.

* * *

She thinks nothing of it at first. At least not until she gets a graphing calculator for her math class. It never works; if she didn't have other suspicions, she'd say it came out of the box broken. At first it simply won't graph — but after a week it stops even calculating. She takes it to her teacher and shows him that it gives her a 'divide by zero' error when she does something as simple as adding 2 + 2 or 1 x 4.

Within the month, it ceases to display numbers. Instead, when she turns it on and presses buttons, it spits out letters that look like Hebrew.

She learns to graph and calculate matrices by hand.

* * *

One night, Sarah loads the dishwasher. Twenty minutes later, the kitchen floor is covered in a thin layer of water and suds. At first her parents think she loaded it wrong, added too much detergent or something, but the problem persists after Irene loads it the next time.

Her father calls a friend, who rolls up his shirtsleeves and inspects the washer.

"One of the hookups came loose," her father's friend says. "Here, I'll just tighten it up and —"

Two weeks later she loads the washer again. Again, the hookup comes loose and Sarah ends up mopping the kitchen. The next time she loads it, her father and Irene watch her, and can find no fault with anything she's doing.

From then on, Sarah washes dishes by hand and Irene loads them later. They all know it's silly. It's not like her touch actually breaks anything, but there's no rational explanation for the consistent loosening hookup. So they might as well just avoid the problem.

That works for six months. Until Sarah's mere presence in the kitchen makes the refrigerator act weird — freezer runs too cold, swathing everything in ice; the refrigerator runs warm — and the dishwasher protest with flooded floors and soap everywhere.

* * *

A year after the Labyrinth run, she makes the telephone stop working. It starts out minor; there's more static on a line she uses. It's not even just the home phone: she can call from a payphone, from a friend's house, and the result is always the same. Staticky lines.

It worsens a month later. Her voice echoes over the line, tinny and strange, and she hears others as if across a great distance.

A month after that, conversations with Sarah often include static, strange hissing noises, tinny voices. Sometimes she swears she can hear the other person saying things they didn't or would never say. People tell her that her voice sounds 'wrong' over the line.

* * *

She doesn't get along with televisions anymore, either. Being near one turns the picture to snow. Toby stops watching cartoons with her. Her parents start asking her to leave the room if they want to watch the news.

She walks into a movie theatre and manages not to break anything. But she spends the entire film staring into Russell Crowe's eyes and wondering why they look so wrong.

* * *

Eventually cars stop working. Engines sputter. Dashboard clocks blink endlessly. Odometers spin backwards — which shouldn't even be possible.

Her father doesn't buy her a car for her sixteenth birthday. In fact, she often ends up riding a bike to school. If she strays too near a car, the engine makes alarming noises or simply won't start.

She never dares try to board a plane.

* * *

She spends the next four years avoiding technology as much as she can. She struggles her way through college with old-fashioned typewriters and gas lamps, never accepting car rides.

She graduates. Her father and Irene take her out for lunch, and somehow, on this day at least, nothing goes wrong.

* * *

She goes home. Things seem almost normal.

* * *

Her father insists on a trip out to Lake Michigan. Sarah sits in the back seat and keeps her eyes closed, hoping. But seat belts unclasp. Brakes squeak, squeal, screech, and finally fail. Irene screams.

Metal crunches; Sarah feels herself strike something hard. She hears glass shatter and opens her eyes to see wreckage, Irene's seat empty. There's a huge hole in the windshield with red around its rim.

Sarah tries to look around,, but falls sideways, feeling strangely boneless. Over the console she sees her father slumped against his steering wheel. He makes soft, fleshy-sounding gasps of pain.

She forces herself to twist her head and look for Toby. But Toby is still safe in his booster seat, staring wide eyed at the wreckage of their family.

Blood drips. Sarah becomes aware of the pain. It's loud, impossibly loud, an endless roaring that begins in her ribs and fills her up to her ears, with little rivulets running down to her fingers and toes. For all its noise it seems distant, like a wave crashing against another shore.

She closes her eyes and makes a wish.

* * *

This was intended as a prequel to "Gifts, Stolen and Received," but also essentially stands alone. For those wondering what wish she made, well, look no further than "Gifts."


End file.
